Charles II and the Royal African Company
King Charles II (reigned 1660 – 1685) and members of the royal family at the time were major investors in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Within six months of ascending the throne, Charles granted a charter to a private joint stock enterprise, the Company of Royal Adventurers Into Africa. The company got a 1000-year monopoly over trade along Africa’s west coast, and the monarch lent them some royal ships, including one called the Blackamoor.
From the start, slaves were the company’s chief trade item. That was made even more explicit in 1663, when the Royal Adventurers were granted a monopoly as the sole enterprise legally authorized to transport slaves from Africa to England’s American colonies. Within a year, the company delivered nearly 800 African slaves to Jamaica, and more than 3000 to Barbados.
In 1672, by which time the demand for slaves in England’s New World colonies had grown by leaps and bounds, Charles granted a new charter to a reorganized and renamed Royal African Company of England. The king’s brother James, the Duke of York and future King James II, was the company’s biggest shareholder, and served as its governor.
The company’s seal made no bones about its core business: it featured an elephant, to represent the ivory trade, and more prominently, two Africans, to represent the slave trade. Before they were shipped to the New World, slaves were branded with the letters DY, for “Duke of York”, or RACE, for “Royal African Company of England”. As one historian noted, the company: “shipped more enslaved African women, men, and children to the Americas than any other single institution during the entire period of the transatlantic slave trade“.
